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Rob Ford apologizes for city purchase of $2,500 chairs

Toronto’s mayor excoriated his own government on talk radio Friday for buying 30 chairs — replicas of Modernist originals in the councillors’ lounge.

Denzil Minnan-Wong sits in a cheap chair beside one of the $2,500 replica chairs the city purchased to replace the original 1960s Modernist chairs designed by Warren Platner, who died in 2006. (DANIEL DALE / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Mayor Rob Ford apologized Friday for the city’s decision to spend $75,000 on 30 chairs for the private councillor lounge at city hall.

The $2,500 chairs are replicas of the 1960s designer chairs that used to sit in the lounge. Those were created by a prominent Modernist designer, the late Warren Platner, and had fallen into disrepair, city officials said.

The purchase of the replicas went through a public procurement process. But Ford, who built his political brand lambasting small-ticket government waste and extravagance, said he was unaware of the purchase until he read the news in the Toronto Sun.

As he regularly did as a council outsider, he quickly took to talk radio, saying he was “shocked” and “absolutely livid.” But his tone soon softened: he is now the chief executive officer of the institution he was scolding.

“I apologize to the taxpayers. I take full responsibility. I should’ve been on top of it,” Ford said at a media scrum he called for later in the day.

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“We have people in responsible positions that they shouldn’t be coming in to my office for every nickel and dime that they’re spending,” he said. “But when stuff like this happens, I have to wear it, and I’m wearing it.”

In his morning interview with Newstalk 1010 host Jerry Agar, Ford vowed that the city employee responsible would “pay the price for this.” In the afternoon scrum, he said “the person that made this mistake” is “no longer with the city.”

But he said that person had not been fired today, and he referred further questions to chief financial officer Rob Rossini, who repeatedly refused to say whether the person’s departure had anything to do with the chairs at all — or even what the supposed mistake was.

“We had a reorganization,” Rossini said.

The chairs are used by councillors while council is in session. The lounge, a bare room above the council chamber, is also used for functions and receptions, but it is not open to the public.

In an internal August memo obtained by conservative councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who believes the city should have bought cheaper chairs, city officials said the Platner chairs had fallen into “a bad state of disrepair” by last year and needed either to be replaced or refurbished, in part because of “health and safety issues” related to “the age of the chair and the many detected and undetected flaws.”

The city invited companies to bid on refurbishing the chairs but received only one exorbitant quote, $7,500 per chair. The city then issued a new request for quotations for replica chairs; the only compliant bid was for $2,495 per chair, which was accepted.

Some of the money spent on the new chairs may be recouped by selling the old chairs. Platner chairs “are considered art pieces, with considerable potential historical value,” the officials wrote.

Ford’s impassioned comments about low-level spending issues tend to produce quiet eye-rolling among other councillors. He presides over a $9.4-billion annual operating budget, and the city will have to pay at least $85 million for cancelling the Scarborough LRT in favour of the subway extension he favours.

But he has always been attuned to public dismay over the government “gravy” — and skillful in seizing on five-figure outrages for political gain.

“Some people can’t comprehend billions. But when you talk about chairs — everybody has a chair,” he told Agar.

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